The Eureka project is unfinished

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The logical conclusion to the Eureka project is a
republic, with a popularly elected head of state, writes Ray
Cassin.

In politics, silence can send as potent a message as any speech.
Take John Howard's unexplained decision not to attend this
weekend's Eureka 150 celebrations in Ballarat, for example.

This refusal, which other senior ministers have dutifully
followed, has been interpreted by Opposition Leader Mark Latham as
a prime ministerial failure to grasp the meaning of the diggers'
uprising. And on this page on Tuesday, Gerard Henderson lamented
the general reluctance of Liberal politicians to see that the
Eureka heritage belongs as much to them as it does to parties of
the left. The Liberals, Henderson complained, have not been very
good at fighting this particular culture war.

Nonsense. The Prime Minister understands very well what Eureka
means and his snubbing of the celebrations is emphatically the act
of a cultural warrior.

Of course Howard understands that the uprising in 1854 was about
democracy, not socialism or any other militant ideology. It's just
that the kind of full-blooded democracy that Eureka represents - a
frank assertion of popular sovereignty, coupled with a demand that
the protection of individual rights be enshrined in law - is not
something he feels comfortable with, let alone wants to
endorse.

Naturally, he won't ever say that. In 2004 no holder of elected
office, especially one with Howard's populist instincts, has the
option of publicly disparaging democracy. But everything we know
about the Prime Minister's attitude to our constitutional
arrangements suggests he will resist any attempt to reinvigorate
them by fostering greater democratic participation.

This is not only a matter of his well-known insistence on
clinging to the monarchy; that stance is of a piece with his
attempt, during the last Parliament, to hobble the Senate and its
inquisitive committees (a proposal that presumably will lapse now
that the coalition has won a Senate majority), and with his
opposition to including in the constitution fundamental guarantees
of the rights of citizens.

Australia is unusual among modern democracies not only in having
no formal declaration of rights, but in virtually omitting mention
of the people from its constitution altogether. We are there
implicitly, of course, because the constitution stipulates that
Parliament must be elected. But it is essentially a text that
defines the distribution of powers between the states and the
Commonwealth: there is no preparatory assertion that Australia is
constituted as a nation by the will of its people, so that the
primary political relationships are between citizens and each other
and between citizens and their governments, not between one tier of
government and another.

The absence of a symbolic declaration of this kind, and of a
bill of rights, perhaps partly explains why the constitution, to
most people, is such an impenetrably dry document. (The British
imperial legislation that first enacted Australia's constitution
does contain a preamble proclaiming the choice of the people, but
this is not part of the constitution itself.)

More importantly, though, the constitutional arrangements we
have tend to accentuate the dominance of executive governments,
especially when, as will be the case from July 1, the government of
the day has a majority in both houses. Politics in this country is
typically experienced as a top-down process: it is about what
governments - and alternative governments - do, rather than about
the action of citizens.

We elect a Parliament every three years (or every four years in
the states), but in between elections we are not of much account;
hence the demand, uttered from time to time by governments
irritated by scrutiny from Parliament or the media, that they
should be "allowed to get on with doing the job they were elected
to do".

This kind of minimally democratic politics is the opposite of
the ethos of the Eureka diggers, who swore "by the Southern Cross
to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and
liberties". And the danger in the revival of interest in Eureka,
for a politician of John Howard's conservative stripe, is that it
just might result in renewed demands for thoroughgoing change in
the way we are governed.

Such change - bottom-up politics, if you like - would be founded
on the assertion in the diggers' charter that the people are "the
only legitimate source of all political power". It would lead to
the creation of an Australian republic, in which the people would
choose their head of state, and in which their rights as citizens
would be acknowledged in the basic instrument of government, the
constitution. It would lead to everything that John Howard doesn't
want.

That's why I suspect the PM is silently raging against the
Speaker's last-minute decision that the House of Representatives
will fly the diggers' Southern Cross flag to mark today's
anniversary. He wouldn't want to be within cooee of anywhere the
Southern Cross is raised this weekend, because he knows that
wherever people see it they'll be reminded of what Eureka started,
and what we still haven't finished.